Offering a conservative counterbalance to the extreme left-coast liberalism of The Huffington Post

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

WHAT WE NEED IS THE REARRANGEMENT OF FOCUS OF THE OLD MEN WHO SEND YOUNG MEN TO WAR

!!!!

Another grovel, not a rebuke

By Wesley Pruden

Where’s a Porta-Potty when a few good men need one?

This is the question Leon Panetta, the secretary of
defense, ought to concern himself with, instead of trying to top Hillary
Clinton, the secretary of state, with over-the-top “outrage” over a
Marine patrol taking a leak on the bodies of several freshly killed
terrorists in Afghanistan.

If Mr. Panetta had been doing his job, he might have found enough
Porta-Potties to spell battlefield relief for the Marines. This should
teach him a needed lesson. Battlefield rest rooms are important, and
will become even more important when women are dispatched to the
battlefield. Lady grunts will expect something more than toilet-seat
etiquette or an inconvenient bush or tree stump to protect their
modesty.

Mr. Panetta and Mrs. Clinton were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other.

The defense secretary and the secretary of state were
each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other, playing
for the cameras a ferocious game of “can you top this?” Mr. Panetta
said what the Marines did was “utterly deplorable.” It’s hard to get
beyond “utterly,” but Mrs. Clinton called in her crack linguistics team
at the State Department—where plain speech is utterly frowned on—and she
soon pronounced herself in “total dismay” on hearing the news, and was
sure that the “vast, vast” majority of “American military personnel”
would never, ever do what those awful Marines did.

Mrs. Clinton’s description of that “vast, vast” majority, and not
merely a “vast” majority, was taken to be an indication that she thought
the Marines’ offense must have been twice as bad as the offense of the
“vast right-wing conspiracy” tormenting Bubba for indulging in
inappropriate merriment with a regiment of big-haired ladies at the
White House. A secretary of state should use language precisely, and
carefully ration her vasts.

Nevertheless, urine is rarely a proper salute even to dead
terrorists, and the four Marines who relieved themselves on Taliban
corpses should be properly disciplined. Americans, instructed by a
culture informed by the certitudes of Jewish and Christian faith, are
better than that. Still, sending two senior Cabinet officers do what a
second lieutenant could have done was just short of a full grovel. The
Obama administration stopped just short of sending the president himself
to deliver a deep bow and a fulsome apology to the Taliban terrorists.

Mr. Panetta, who served two years as an Army intelligence officer
several decades ago, knows better. Mrs. Clinton, whose hands-on
knowledge of warfare and weaponry is limited to the lamps she threw at
Bubba in the White House, has no knowledge of what Gen. William
Tecumseh Sherman, the infamous Civil War firebug, was talking about when
he famously said “war is hell.”

Dehumanizing the enemy is the first task of the men who send boys to
war, men who never have to learn that war is more than merely a policy
option. “But of course [these Marines] have dehumanized the enemy,”
Sebastian Junger, a documentary filmmaker who spent a year with an Army
platoon in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, observes in The
Washington Post. “Otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt
and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrate a
callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal
something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince
themselves that they haven’t just committed their first murder—that they
have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.”

Rick Perry got it right when he said the Obama administration’s
rhetoric showed “a disdain for the military.” The incontinent Marines
should be reprimanded, but filing criminal charges against them is
unreasonable. “Kids, 18- and 19-year old kids make stupid mistakes all
too often and that’s what occurred here. To call it a criminal act is
over the top.”

An anonymous veteran of the Vietnam war makes a similar point in an
Internet blog. “I was on the line in the A Shau Valley with the 101st
Airborne Division. At Camp Sally, not a Club Med place to be. Nor for
the faint of heart. You must understand that those who live war are a
different breed. Perhaps later, much later, maturity rearranges one’s
focus.”

What we need now is the rearrangement of the focus of the old men who
send young men to war. They don’t have youth and inexperience to excuse
their sins, miscalculations and misjudgments. These old men should keep
this in mind when deciding how to discipline the Marines sent across
the seas to defend and, if need be die, for their country.

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About Me

A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days.
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RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke.
- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language...........
You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com